Ambition and Jealousy: Income Interactions in the “Old” Europe versus the “New” Europe and the United States This paper asks how income distribution affects individual well-being and tries to explore the idea that this relation depends on the degree of mobility and uncertainty in the economy. It mostly concentrates on the relation between satisfaction and reference income (defined as the income...

Policy, Institutional Factors and Earnings Mobility This paper uses ECHP and OECD data for 14 EU countries to explore the role of labour market factors in explaining cross-national differences in the dynamic structure of earnings: in permanent inequality, transitory inequality and earnings mobility. Based on ECHP, minimum distance estimator is used to decompose earnings inequality into the perm...

We use Monte Carlo simulations and real data to assess the performance of methods dealing with measurement error in investment equations. Our experiments show that fixed effects, error heteroscedasticity, and data skewness severely affect the performance and reliability of methods found in the literature. Estimators that use higher-order moments return biased coefficients for (both) mismeasured...

The second and third generation of immigrants have been the centre of a lively debate about the economic integration of immigrants into their host societies, but there is little empirical evidence on the German case. In this study I comprehensively portray the labour market outcomes of second generation immigrants in Germany. Special attention is attributed to observable heterogeneity in terms ...

The paper advocates and implements a new panel structure model to investigate the club convergence hypothesis. The model consists of a set of linear dynamic models that characterize the behavior of growth rates within each convergence club and a logistic regression that classifies these linear models. An EM algorithm is used to estimate the system by maximum likelihood and inference is conducte...

Sundays Are Blue: Aren’t They? The Day-of-the-Week Effect on Subjective Well-Being and Socio-Economic Status This paper analyses whether individuals are influenced by the day of the week when reporting subjective well-being. By using a large panel data set and controlling for observed and unobserved individual characteristics, we find a large day-of the-week effect. Overall, we find a ‘blue’ Su...

Fixed effects estimators of nonlinear panel models can be severely biased due to the incidental parameters problem. In this paper I find that the most important component of this incidental parameters bias for probit fixed effects estimators of index coefficients is proportional to the true value of these coefficients, using a large-T expansion of the bias. This result allows me to derive a low...

An understanding of the spatial dimension of economic and social activity requires methods that can separate out the relationship between spatial units that is due to the effect of common factors from that which is purely spatial even in an abstract sense. The same applies to the empirical analysis of networks in general. We are able to distinguish between cross-sectional strong dependence and ...

Unlike policy makers‟ belief that geographical proximity to incumbent exporters encourages non-exporters to start exporting through positive information externalities, the empirical evidence in early studies is mixed. To make a contribution to fill the gap, this paper reexamines the relationship between the spatial and industrial agglomeration of exporting firms and the probability of being an ...

This paper demonstrates how parsimonious models of sinusoidal functions can be used to fit spatially variant time series in which there is considerable variation of a periodic type. A typical shortcoming of such tools relates to the difficulty in capturing idiosyncratic variation in periodic models. The strategy developed here addresses this deficiency. While previous work has sought to overcom...